Commentary

Heller Adds to “Education” Book Series

Written by Typographica on August 25, 2004

The craft of typography thirsts for education information. So it’s exciting to see the omniubiquitous Steven Heller has weighed in with a book titled The Education of a Typographer, joining his others of similar name (The Education of an Illustrator, Graphic Designer, and Design Entrepreneur). I haven’t read it yet — I’ll leave the reviews to the more literate JLT — but the list of contributors is fairly impressive. A glaring omission is Underware, whose workshops break new ground in teaching methods and online presentation. It’s a shame their thoughts aren’t part of what should still be a very revealing book.

2 Comments

I am 3/4 of the way through reading this (at the same time as I madly preprare and teach my first class), and it is now littered with post-it notes. As with any collection, there are some great things and some not-so-great things. But a couple of the essays have already influenced what and how I will teach my class (of note: Chris Myers’ “The Value of Narrative in the Education of a Typographer”) and others have been gratifyingly reassuring that I’m doing something right.

I read the book about a month ago. I skipped parts of it. Overall it’s pretty good, my biggest concern/complaint about it is that it fails to make it clear what a “typographer” is. Is it a typeface designer, is it a graphic designer that sets type really really nice, is it a combination of both? Who’s this book for: grpahic designers or typeface designers? (Yes, there is a HUGE difference). Most essays are ambiguous to this, it’s in the interviews where it gets rather iffy.

Other than that, the book is a complete and well-rounded overview like the rest of the series.

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